


Summer Sweat

by flecksofpoppy



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-12
Updated: 2011-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-25 23:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/pseuds/flecksofpoppy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heavyarms smells like summer sweat and engine oil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Sweat

Heavyarms smells like summer sweat and engine oil.

Later, after snow and ice and the heat of Italy and France, Heero will hear a civilian say that the Gundams everyone feared during the war looked like angels with dirty faces. He will try to remember, in that moment, not what makes him human, but what makes everyone else human.

He will remember Zechs in the snow, Trowa's voice, Relena as a child; he will remember all of this as a moment of urgency, a moment when he knew who he was.

Heero will find that although he remembers voices, he recalls smells better than anything else. And in retrospect, when he smells sunshine and apples and gunpowder, he'll remember the interior of Heavyarms.

Heero will find, in his future, that he _has_ a future, and he will wonder whether he longs or remembers, desires or idealizes.

But in this moment of winter, of masks and of broken arms blooming red, he thinks: Heavyarms smells like the present, like summer sweat and engine oil.

There is something about a hidden knife that speaks to the liar within him. It speaks to the underhandedness of war, of a battle that is balanced on a dull edge between justice and brutality. It is the meeting of two souls with ideals; but Heero wonders for whom they are truly fighting.

Angels are redundant here on the tundra, hovering in the cloud white air, human cores with faintly beating hearts; but nothing that sweats, no warm lips and warm hands, nothing like summer in a dark, quiet room with beads of perspiration threading across foreheads.

Heero remembers summer.

And he thinks that he is grateful to these men that have shaped him, as Trowa's glowing blade and hidden knife fly through the ice and the flakes and the cold. He thinks that he is grateful to have been sculpted at all, even as the invisible heart of an anthropomorphic monstrosity made for killing.

 _Zechs will send him letters._

This is a fever dream that Heero has in the base amongst the silent snow drifts.

 _Trowa will send him letters._

This is a daydream that Heero has amongst buildings wavering with heat, since it means that somewhere, beyond snow and space, Trowa's fingers will still be warm.

And Heero thinks of Marseilles again as he takes his final swing.

**Author's Note:**

> I blame this on the various conversations I've been having about GW. Okay, I totally blame this on myself after babbling some shit about how it's hot that Heero uses Trowa's Gundam during Antarctica.


End file.
